Was mostly a work-week, still trying to find the optimal setup with my new work device. Running the corporate VPN inside a VM together with a Dante proxy. First tried this on Linux x86_64 (because the legacy VPN software is not available for ARM Linux). Then realised while talking to Moellus that I could possibly use a macOS VM which uses ARM CPU and got the VPN client and might be able to compile Dante SOCKS. Guest VMs which use ARM CPU are much much faster on the M2 CPUs.

So quickly installed macOS in a VM and compiled Dante. Worked OKish. Unfortunately there is some tcp session issue with Dante and macOS. So back to Linux x86.

Next networking challenge was the Name Resolution. I usually us my personal PiHole as DNS-Resolver to block Ads and Youtube and so on. The PiHole sits outside my home networks so it’s reachable from any location I’m working in. That results in my laptop inability to resolve local network names properly as it would query the PiHole first. But fortunately there is a way to teach the macOS DNS resolver to use different DNS Servers for certain domains.

You’ll have to create a directory /etc/resolver and place file with your special resolver settings in there. Mine is called fritz.box and has the following content:

domain fritz.box
search fritz.box
nameserver 192.168.175.1

This tells the macOS DNS resolver to use this IP address for the domain fritz.box.

Wednesday

On Wednesday I finally met with Daniel again for a run in the Tiergarten. Early morning meeting at the Brandenburger Tor.

3D-Printing

after not using the 3D-Printer for many weeks over the summer I fired up the trusty OctoPi and the printer to print out a case for my new RaspberryPi 4. And everything just worked. I didn’t even had to level the bed or something. It just worked at the first attempt.

Power saving

I have an old PC serving as a Jenkins server to regularly update some docker images for me. The upstream projects don’t change that often and a build about once a day seems sufficient for me. Having the PC running all day long seems like a waste of resources.

I’ve another old PC running continuously to serve S3-compatible object storage for my Mastodon instances. So there is already a machine running 24/7. I used this machine to send a Wake-On-LAN signal at a specific time each day. Waking up that Jenkins PC to let it check its repositories and execute the builds. The PC will shutdown at a fixed time as well and thus run only a fraction of the time for roughly the same result. I’ll have daily new images of my Docker stuff if need be.

Fediverse

I asked the “Volkshochschule” #Uckermark (adult education centre) whether they think a social media course with focus on the Fediverse would be something that their audience would be interested in. They seem to like the idea and now I have to come up with a plan and course material. Fortunately the new semester for them starts only next years. So will be only February 2024 or so.

Barbie

On Saturday we decided to spontaneously go an watch the “Barbie” movie in the local cinema. As it was a super hot summer day, the cinema was rather empty. We had cosy lounge seats and coffee was served at the table.

The movie itself was quite good. Really good acting by the main characters and some funny quirks.

This movie is certainly not for weak masculine egos. Thats why I like it 😀